Are you searching for the best web design company to help design your business web site? You will firstly have to consider your budget and the quality of service that you are looking for. One way to do this is to browse through the internet to check out a number of companies and narrow down your selection to the most suitable one. To make it easier for you, read on to find out the basic guidelines to follow in choosing the best web design company.

Relevant experience of the company is the first important aspect that you must consider. For instance, if your business web site is focused on fashion, you would do well in choosing a company that has specific fashion-related design in their portfolio. To make sure that the company is serious about the business, a formal contract is a sign that it is able to deliver to you as promised.

Get a perspective on the type of web site design you are aiming for. There are many types of designs which include e-commerce, database, Flash, static HTML and one designed with self- content management structure. A company who is familiar with the standard HTML design may not be the best choice if you are looking to have a complete Flash look for your site.

Take into consideration of the cost of update packages. Once a web site has been designed and completed, there are periodic updates which are done by the company. You should find out about the prices of updates after the standard design has been made. This can help you prepare financially.

Get a web design company that reflects your own taste. If you are all into neat and bright colors, choosing a company which is all about Flash is a bad idea. Make sure the company sets realistic goals to be accomplished within the deadline and deliver them in time.

By following these simple guidelines, you are on the right path to choose a company that will offer you satisfying results for your business web page.

This article sets out several Web marketing solutions – presenting the pros and cons of various complementary Web marketing activities.

5 Complementary Web Marketing Activity Combinations

Article and Video Marketing (my favorite)

PPC and Facebook Ads (paid advertising)

Affiliate Programs

Social Media Campaigns

Blogging, bookmarking, and organic SEO

I started with blogging and organic SEO. Once I started ranking very well, I added article marketing. Recently, I ventured into video marketing. If I were to do it again, I would have started article marketing earlier.

My core activities are complementary – they focus on publishing content. I leverage that content by publishing it in my business blog, in EzineArticles, and then creating videos from that content.

That said, I’ve also dabbled in PPC, Facebook Ads, and social media campaigns. I like publishing content the most; consequently I did this consistently and did it better.

I’ll briefly set out the pros and cons of each combination of Web marketing activities.

1. Article and Video Marketing

Pros

You can do it for free

If done well, builds credibility and can be very effective.

Can easily leverage the content.

Residual benefits – the published content works for your business indefinitely – as long as it remains published.

Relatively easily outsourced. You’ll need to be judicious who you hire. You tend to get what you pay for.

Huge leverage opportunity if other websites publish your articles and/or videos. Could go viral. This is the best-case scenario.

The backlinks can help your website’s organic SEO – especially if your content is syndicated.

Cons

It’s time consuming to create the content.

It takes a while to see results (especially compared to paid advertising).

May take a little while to get the right people doing it for you.

Scaling up takes a little while because you need to generate the content.

2. PPC and Facebook Ads

Pros

Immediate results. You may have to test and tweak some, but you can get website visitors very, very quickly.

Easily scalable. If you want more traffic, pay more money.

Target as many keywords as you like immediately.

Quickly measurable. Because results are immediate, you can test and tweak very quickly.

Costs are variable in that you pay when you get desired action (i.e. click thrus to your website).

Fairly easy to outsource – you’ll want to shop around. There are many ineffective and/or costly PPC and Facebook consultants.

Cons

Costs money. In fact, if your target keywords become more competitive, you costs can rise.

Likely lower conversion rate on your business website because visitors are not pre-sold (like they are with content publishing).

If you don’t do organic SEO, you miss out on traffic from the organic search engine listings.

3. Running an Affiliate Program

If you offer a product or service for which you can recruit affiliates to promote your business, then you could have a ready-made army of sales-people very quickly.

The key is having a very high converting sales funnel and offer excellent incentives to attract affiliate marketers.

Pros

You can build a massive Web presence very quickly if you attract a lot of affiliate marketers (or a few effective affiliate marketers).

Your costs are associated directly with sales or some form of action. In other words, the costs are attached to sales or some form of action that you pay commissions on.

Build trust among your community. You can establish credibility and expert status with ongoing contribution. If you succeed developing expert status, this can be extremely effective. Your products/services will sell well – in fact, you’ll create demand for your business specifically.

It’s a social activity, which may appeal to you.

No or low cost. You can build Facebook pages, use Twitter, comment on blogs, and join forums for no cost.

Difficult to outsource. It’s you the community wants to dialogue with.

Not effective for every type of market. If your customers don’t participate in social media, then this approach may not be as effective.

5. Blogging, Bookmarking, and Organic SEO

These three work well together. In fact, blogging results in organic SEO if you apply some simple on-site and off-site SEO techniques. When you write great content, it makes sense to get attention to it by bookmarking it with the prominent bookmarking services (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.).

Pros

Blogging has the same pros as article marketing. The activity is the same – only the platform differs.

Bookmarking is a very quick way to get attention to your business. Be sure you bookmark truly interesting content. Don’t bookmark sales pages.

Organic SEO is free and can bring you a lot of business.

Cons

Blogging has the same cons as article marketing.

Social bookmarking is time-consuming and may not result in conversion. If you attract visitors because of an interesting article, those visitors may not be interested in what you have to offer. It’s difficult for some types of businesses to use social bookmarking that results in sales.

Organic SEO takes a long time to get results. If you outsource it, it can be very expensive. However, if you rank well in the search engines, the potential sales is huge.

Also with organic SEO, you must continue working on it to stay ahead of your competitors.

When choosing Web marketing solutions, consider the following:

If you’ll be doing it yourself, do you like the activity? If you hate writing, then article marketing isn’t for you unless you’re prepared to hire writers.

Know your market. Will you find them or they you through your chosen Web marketing activities? For instance, if your market doesn’t use Twitter, then there’s little point in using Twitter.

Don’t do something just because you heard it’s effective. This results in jumping from one activity to another. Pick and stick.

Let’s continue with the questions we should ask before hiring a web marketing company:

• Do they use only white hat SEO techniques? Stay away from any company using black hat SEO. As the name suggests, black hat SEO employs a number of dishonest tricks to get your website ranked. Where these techniques may have worked well a year or so ago, Google has now got wise and built their algorithms to beat the black SEO arts! This type of SEO can also get your site banned.

• How do they build links? Backlinks are extremely important to the ranking of your website. If your links are coming from link farms you could face heavy penalties from Google. Make sure your SEO company builds links in a reputable manner.

• Make your own impression of a company. If your gut instinct tells you something isn’t right then it’s a good idea to move on. If a company can’t sell itself properly from the start, give you a good honest price, or tell you their strategy, then you need to choose another company. Sometimes it is difficult to avoid being misled, but when you learn a bit more about SEO and the questions to ask, you can avoid this.

• A high quote does not guarantee you will get high quality. The larger a firm gets, the more it will usually charge, but some of the smaller local SEO companies can give you the same results for much less. A company that works inefficiently might need to charge high prices to make up for their shortfall in getting work completed.

• Cheap can work out more expensive. Remember the saying about paying peanuts? Well this can be true when hiring an SEO company or professional. Professional SEO companies work for realistic prices and will give you an itemized quote that you can understand and consider at your leisure. Any company that pushes you into making a decision should be avoided.

• Choose an SEO company that offers SEO packages. Most SEO companies offer their services as a package these days. This allows companies to budget for their SEO marketing and to avoid being tied into any expensive contracts.

• Ask some tricky questions your SEO company if you can. Don’t worry if you are not an expert on SEO. There are still a number of questions you can ask.

For instance you might want to ask them what search engines they will automatically submit your website to. Scammers will always try to impress you by blinding you with big figures. The answer you are looking for is ‘we don’t do automatic submissions’.

Another question you can ask is whether they can place you in the top 10 websites for keywords you have chosen. This is a bit of a trick question, but a good company will suggest that they find the most relevant and prolific keywords for you.

• Ask if they offer subscription services. SEO needs to be tackled on a daily basis to ensure your ranking does not slide. A good company will ensure they are tackling your SEO on a daily basis and monitoring the results. When choosing an SEO package, make sure you choose one that offers post-optimization services. This maintenance will ensure you always have some SEO assistance and that you are not left alone to maintain your SEO. You might also want to see if the company offers additional services such as Pay per Click or social media marketing. These are all services you might need in the future.

These are some of the most important questions and areas you can investigate when choosing a web marketing company or professional. Any SEO company that can be trusted will only be too happy to answer your questions.